It's Monday, October 31st, 2022. I'm Albert Molar, and this is the briefing, a daily

analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Two absolutely explosive political

stories as we go into the new week, the first from Brazil, the second from the United States.

In Brazil, Lula is back. The presidential runoff election there in Brazil, which is after

all Latin America's largest democracy in the fourth largest democratic government in the

world. That runoff election means that the leftist former president of Brazil, Louise

Inacio Lula de Silva, is headed back for Brazil's presidential office. And he's doing so by

a margin. It appears as of this morning of a couple of million votes. Now out of the

total votes cast, that is a small percentage, but it is a decisive percentage if the numbers

stand as we know them now. The story behind this is also absolutely important. The fact that

Brazil, as its official language, Portuguese reminds us that during the age of exploration,

Portugal was one of the major seafaring powers, and it was the Portuguese who settled what

we now know as Brazil. Eventually, Brazil gained its independence and it became a large self-governing

nation. Under much of Brazil's history, it was ruled by the military. But at least in

more recent years, it has functioned as an electoral democracy. And that turns out to

be really important because Brazil has not only a very large economy, it has a very large

political influence, not only in Central and South America, but throughout the world.

Brazil is a political powerhouse. And thus, when Gair Bolsonaro, a candidate of the populist

right, was elected in the last presidential election, that form of conservative populism

or more properly, a populism of the right, began to be apparent in other nations. And of

course, it was Bolsonaro who was elected during the same time that Donald Trump was president

of the United States, and similar, more conservative or at least more rightist populist movements

...